Epics are commonly referred to as encyclopedic, so
implying qualities such as comprehensiveness, variety,
and scope that require integration. The tension between
unity and variety takes many forms and may lead to
such disputes as whether Lucan's Pharsalia is a loose
historical poem rather than an integral epic. At the heart
of these assumptions are two issues: what is the regular
or necessary by which the irregular becomes unwanted,
and what are the true grounds of a true epic? If full
assurance seems a vain hope, it is striking to observe the
comfort Milton enjoyed. Through that lengthy career
of changes in his religious and political beliefs, he
claimed “truth” as a familiar, constant possession. And
yet in addressing his ideas of the regular and irregular
in epic poetry, even he had a moment of unanswered
questioning of what an epic should be. That came, it
will be recalled, in his Reason of Church-Government
(1642). The issues involved

what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her
musing hath liberty to propose to her self, though of
highest hope, and hardest attempting, whether that Epick
form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other
two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein
are strictly to be kept, or nature to be follow'd, which in
them that know art, and use judgement is no transgression
but an inriching of art. And lastly what K[ing] or Knight
before the conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the
pattern of a Christian Heroe.(CPW 1.812–14)

For his epic Milton has an obliging Muse who “inspires
/ Easie my unpremeditated Verse” (9.23–24).
The ease of his “unpremeditated Verse” does not apply
to calm of mind about the versification of his epics.
So we quickly discover in reading “The Verse, ” that label
given some two dozen lines of prose added to deal
with the problem that his publisher said had stumbled
contemporary readers, “why the Poem Rhimes not.”
The answer is given straight off: “The Measure is English
Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin”(Works 2.pt.1.6; italic
usage reversed). These poets and Tasso had been the
models for epic which Milton contemplated in writing The Reason of Church-Government, and if the Italian is
no longer adequate, that is obviously because of his use
of rhyme. Of course Milton continued to admire and to
need Tasso for other reasons. But Paradise Lost is “an
example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd
to Heroic Poem from the troblesom and modern
bondage of Rimeing” (ibid.). Rhyme is a modern barbarism,
whereas this unrhymed and yet more modern
epic recovers the true original, the prisca veritas. How
reforming, how Protestant this is. (For other issues of
the first, see Excursus 6.327.)

Our words “regular” and “irregular” of course derive
from Latin “regula, ” rule, pattern, or model. Milton
turns regularity and irregularity inside out. What had
been regular (rhymed verse) is presented as irregular on
the basis of temporal and more particularly qualitative
and veridical grounds. What is regular about Paradise
Lost is that it “Rhimes not” and rejects the gorgeous fiction
of chivalry along with war as a subject. Those very
features of the poem that make it hardest to put it in the
line of Renaissance and classical epics are taken to be
the normal ones. (What had been regular is now irregular,
and that unheard of—religious epic in unrhymed
vernacular verse—is now regular.) We must accept in
poetic faith the new claim to what constitutes, if solely
for Milton's practice, epic regularity and irregularity.

It cannot be said that Milton made blank verse the
rule. Apart from the disasters suffered by his imitators,
the two greatest translations of epic in English—
Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Homer—postdate Paradise
Lost and yet are in rhyme. But such is the indisputable
greatness of Paradise Lost that in its wake rhymed
heroic verse in English was no longer the sole expectation.
Milton also brought about a change in the nature
of possible regularity that implied new possibilities for
irregularity. If Paradise Lost is regular, the presence of
rhyme becomes an irregularity.

It is a tribute to the strength of the regular and
expected that a heightening of rhyme in rhymed verse
is more readily observed than occasional rhymes in
unrhymed verse. Dryden's triplets, with the third line
so often an alexandrine, are so conspicuous that they
often feature in imitations of his style, as imitations
of Milton's involve verbal stilt walking and placing
adjectives after their nouns.

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